Breaking up is a fundamental part of the human experience, but sadness is never routine. The last chapter of a romantic relationship is often plagued by questions – What has changed? Who changed? – and serious psychological examination and chewing. Breakups shake the human world in such a way, according to new research, that you may be ending things without even realizing it.
In a study published in the journal Monday Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show how threatening breakdowns can be identified so far three months before they actually occur. The team discovered this shift by taking a closer look at Redditors’ messages from Reddit’s r / BreakUps, a forum for anonymous discussion of failed relationships, before and after their part own story to the forum.
The findings suggest that people are affected by a future break before they even know that an outline is on the map. Language markers that in turn are detected lasted up to six months after the event.
Two general changes in the postal language were observed:
- Language has become more personal, with the increasing use of ‘I’ and ‘us’.
- Language showed signs of increase cognitive processing.
Sarah Seraj is a research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the study. She tells Reverse the effect of a breakup extends far beyond the romantic realm.
“These changes are noticeable even when people are not talking directly about their relationship, which shows the effects of breakups on all aspects of their lives,” Seraj says.
” Changes in people’s language even before the actual breakup mean that even though they did not necessarily know that the end of the relationship would come, it had already affected their lives, ” she says.
“The cracks in the relationship can occur a while before the end of the relationship, which can pop up when people talk to others about it.”
How decompositions unfold – Seraj explains that breaking is difficult in a natural environment. Researchers usually use retrospective self-reports to find out what’s gone down – and if you’ve ever listened to a friend tell their own divergent story, you’ll know that these retellings may not be as reliable or as objective as science requires. not.
“We can track people down over time and ask them to fill out surveys, but we can not follow them exactly in their personal lives and record conversations with friends and family about their interruptions,” Seraj says.
Instead, Seraj and her team went to an objective measure they could: natural language data. At first glance, this data looks like a message on social media or a text chat with friends. Through the eyes of a scientist, they offer a record of subtle changes in psychological conditions. The computational analysis of natural language, explains Seraj, is a fairly new tool – but critical. Computers can detect small changes that a person cannot – such as how pronouns and prepositions play in psychology.
Bring in the Redditors – To collect natural language data, the team turned to Reddit. Eventually, they analyzed more than 1 million posts from 6,800 Reddit users, one year before and one year after sharing news about their interruptions in the subreddit r / BreakUps.
What makes Reddit fruitful for this kind of study, Seraj explains, is that you can follow a person’s conversations in different areas of their lives based on the subreddits they are engaged in. Once a user was identified as having made an outline – due to their post on r / BreakUps – the team was able to follow how they discussed other topics before and after the event, and could see changes in language usage in this other conversations have been transferred. To be included in the dataset, users had to have at least five posts on Reddit, at least one post on a subredit other than r / BreakUps and that they posted at least one month before and after their own breakdown.
“One of the other neat things about Reddit is that people post about their lives using anonymous user handles,” says Seraj.
“It not only allows them to talk about deeply personal topics without fear of it returning to their personal lives, but it also protects their identity.”
What has been discovered – Language markers of impending congestion were evident up to three months before the event, peaked in the week of the outbreak, and returned to baseline about six months later, according to the study.
Language markers include a greater use of the words ‘I’ and ‘us’, and what the researchers call ‘cognitive processing words’.
Cognitive processing refers to how someone makes sense or responds to an event. In the context of this study would be an example when people try to find out why their relationship ended, and understand their role.
In this example from the study, the bold words are signs of cognitive processing:
‘I am indecisive or not to share my story. I need some help because I bird lost but my story is long and not sure if it’s worth sharing. ‘
The language changes observed in the pre-breakup phase indicate that interruptions to typical thought patterns occur before the breakups themselves occur.
“The reason cognitive processing words were high even before the breakup is because relationships rarely go south overnight,” Seraj says.
“The cracks in the relationship can occur a while before the end of the relationship, which can occur when people talk to others about it.”
The great takeaway – This study is the first to detect how long fractions affect emotional states by analyzing language data. Users average about nine months to return to their baseline.
Eventually, people who posted about their interruptions for longer periods of time had the hardest time overcoming them and took the longest to go on.
It makes sense in some ways, but not in others. Studies do suggest that ‘expressive writing’ can modestly improve mental health in times of need. But chewing can harm the psyche. The theoretical theoretical repetitive writing about the same events can cause individuals to continually relive disturbing events and eventually delay their recovery.
“People who talked about their interruptions for longer periods of time were less accommodating than people who initially sought support but then continued,” Seraj says.
“It could be because they started with a worse diversity, but it could also be because they were talking about their disagreement.”
In the course of the study, Seraj and her colleagues read ‘so many heartbreaking stories about breakups’.
However, there is a silver lining to the suddenly single: Those dealing with the romantic loss are very much not alone, says Seraj.
“It will be a struggle at first, but things will get better,” she says. ‘For most people in our study, it took about six months before things got back to normal. It’s longer than you think! ”
Summary: By analyzing the language on the social media platform Reddit, we have traced people’s social, cognitive and emotional lives as they deal with the dissolution of a close intimate relationship. Language markers can detect impending disintegration of the relationship up to 3 months before it occurs, with continued psychological side effects lasting 6 months after dissolution. Because the language shifts are also evident from subreddits (forums) that are not related to relationships, the research points to the crucial impact that personal revolutions have on people’s social worlds. Similar cognitive and social effects are evident among people undergoing divorce or dealing with major life secrets. The analysis of subtle shifts in pronouns, articles and other almost invisible words can reveal the psychological consequences of life experiences.